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Once in a while, the web development community reintroduces old ideas in a new way. Years ago, there was a concept called ECML (E-Commerce Markup Language) that added an HTML attribute to identify values in a FORM that could be auto-filled from a users “virtual wallet”. Sadly, while it was implemented on a variety of websites (mine included), it was not widely supported and disappeared.

The concept has been reintroduced as values in the ‘autocomplete’ attribute in HTML5. Traditionally this attribute was only used to prevent auto-filling of values, now it can identify which values it is related to for pre-fill.

The usual payment, address and demographic fields (and variations of each) are supported.

With the rate of updates and security patches for Java, administration of your Ubuntu machines can become tedious. There’s a better way… allow it to check for and update with your other software. The steps are easy…

Often you find a neeed to keep an old copy of Firefox around for testing or to use a specific plugin (Example: Selenium). In these cases it can often prove problematic to allow the browser to auto-update. Here are some simple steps to prevent this behavior.

Enter “about:config” into the Firefox URL bar, then change the following values. You can click on them to toggle.
app.update.auto = false
app.update.enabled = false

Alternately, on Windows you can edit the config file at: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\.default\prefs.js

Then in httpd.conf, set the MIME type:AddType application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig .pac

Also in httpd.conf, add a redirect to the actual file you wish to use.Redirect permanent /wpad.dat http://www.giantgeek.com/proxy.pac

In the new file, add the following default contents, modify if you use a proxy:
/* 'proxy.pac' - This is the main function called by any browser
NOTE: there is NO proxy!
*/
function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
return “DIRECT”;
} // End function FindProxyForUrl